Work Text:
Consciousness returns to him like a splash of water. He feels sore and nauseous, but he forgets about that when he notices that there is something warm covering him like the sun through the water.
He is not used to warmth, not since he has learned that everyone leaves at some point, not since his mother left. It surprises him a little to feel that warmth around him like he was everything like he deserved it.
He decides to open his eyes and that’s when he understands.
He is not home; he is far from home.
He blinks several times to get his eyes used to the semi-dark room around him. He is used to the darkness of the deep sea, but somehow this one is a different kind, he can feel it in the cold chill that floats around. The darkness is metallic, warm, and synthetic, a construct of a familiar material that can only be found in one place besides his nation.
He almost smiles.
He knew she’ll find him.
He takes a few seconds to take in his surroundings. The room is silent, so he guesses that it must be somewhere between night and morning since the room wasn’t as dark as his nation. He also notices that he is not alone, that there is someone familiar that smells of fresh waterfalls and…fierceness as if that could have a smell.
He smirks, none less, recognizing her not just by her unique lovely smell all over the place but also because of her warmth and snoring.
Who would have thought that the Queen of Wakanda snored so loud?
With sore muscles, he touches his naked chest, where her hand is resting close to his heart. He thinks is ironic, because he now wears the scars of the ripped wing and her claws. She could be warm, but also a pain in the ass.
He shifts in bed until he is facing her. In the semi-dark room, she looks small and vulnerable but also like salvation. Her short curls are all over the place, contraposing the rest of her body that was curled close to him, but in a way, a cat will. It occur to him that she looked dead to the world, way too vulnerable to be just sleeping beside someone who tried to kill her and was almost successful not so long ago.
Surface people were weird he guessed.
He smirks, nonetheless. She had kept her promise of protecting his nation from the surface and keeping his secret when she became Queen of Wakanda while her nephew was older enough. In exchange, he decided to have fun, since he liked to send warriors to cause a little bit of innocent mayhem just to remind her and the Council that they were still around.
But somewhere between the political teasing (and some other type too) and the loneliness being a monarch brought, her protections had failed, and some colonizers started searching for vibranium again. And this time, his forces were not available to defeat them (with the Wakandan technology) because they brought their own.
After a fight where they succeeded in defeating his army and himself, they took him somewhere, but before they could stick needles into him to make tests like he was a damn new species of fish, he got out and went to the first place he knew he was going to get help. He passed out in the place where they first met, after asking her something with the last strength he had left. (Those damn colonizers had made something to him, given something, and made him weak).
And now he wakes to her and her warmth, to her vulnerable snoring self, making him realize once more that they have more in common than they thought. They were alone, with a common enemy and a common past, with the same desire of burning the people that made them suffer in the first place.
He was proud and he had a plan, but that was before the colonizers turned to him and not her and Wakanda (as he thought they will). He had lived enough to know that his people came first and that he could forget his desire to destroy Wakanda in revenge, of making her beg. He needed help to get his warriors and people out of the colonizers’ hands and safe enough in Talokan.
Yet instead of waking her up with the questions of why they are sharing a bed like he guessed he should, his trembling hand approaches her face to get a curl out of her forehead since her curls were getting longer. He slowly and softly gets it out but some feeling, some temptation makes him succumb, and before he knows it his thumb is back in her forehead and decides to go down, through her nasal bone and the curve of her nose, down to her upper lip and then across them, brushing her lower lip, until his thumb is stopping in her chin.
He thinks he has gotten away with it, since she hasn’t moved an inch or reacted in any way, that he touched a goddess in a dream, and he can now run away without her noticing. But just when he is about to let go of her and pretend nothing happened, he notices the snoring is gone and a pair of chocolate eyes are looking at him through the dark.
And he swears for a second that her eyes shine like a panther’s when she is so ready to strike her pray.
They stare at each other like they have been caught stealing algae from the wrong field or like they have been caught by the Council snicking more technology than accorded to their allies. A few heartbeats pass until she regains enough consciousness and panic enters her bloodstream.
As fast and not so graceful as a panther, she sits down in the bed and pushes away from him with panic in her eyes. He reaches for her in reflex, yet before he can grab her, she goes back once more, and then the noise of something falling and breaking and a loud thud are heard.
“Shuri”, he calls, using her name in what feels like an eternity. He crawls to the other side of the bed, worried about her, but before he can go farther, her curls pop from the bed’s side.
“Shhh!”, she whispers-screams.
He frowns.
“Why are you -?”
Steps fast approaching are heard and he can understand why she told him to shut up.
“You need to hide”, she whispers-yells again, getting to her feet in a second.
Before he can complain, she is taking his arm to get him out of the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to save your life from Okoye”, she answers, before she drags him to the bathroom. “Hide and don’t even think about moving”.
And then she closes the door in his face, and he is alone in a very fancy bathroom. (Of course, she is a Queen).
He hears the door of her room opening and steps entering.
The voice of another woman but much older is heard through the door.
“My Queen, we heard a commotion, are you alright?”, she asks, while he hears other people entering the room and walking around it.
“Okoye, I’m fine, I just knocked this lamp on my sleep”, Shuri answers, a little bit lamely. He chuckles because she could kick his ass but not lie. What a true Queen she was.
There is a moment of silence where he hears people inspecting the room. He stays still as a statue in the dark behind the bathroom door in case someone decided to enter.
“Are you sure that you’re fine, my Queen? You look flustered and…”
“I’m fine, just had a nightmare”.
“I thought you didn’t have any more of those”.
“Well, I have them sometimes. Ladies, please, stop looking around. It was just the nightmare”, he hears the steps stop, especially the ones that were pretty close to the bathroom door.
There is a moment of silence before the Dora Milaje leave the room and there is only Okoye with Shuri.
“Would you be fine?”
“Yes, Okoye. I just need a moment”.
A beat of silence.
“Very well”, he hears Okoye leave, but then he hears her steps returning. “I was going to tell you this in the morning, but I think is pertinent I do it now”.
“What happened now?”, Shuri asks, sounding exhausted.
“Namor, the Fishboy”, he frowns making an offended face no one can see.
“He is older than the two of us together”.
“Your point is?”
“That he is your elder and you shouldn’t call him that”, Okoye says something in their language that he very much would like to know.
“Like as I was saying, Namor is not in the medical wing. Wouldn’t you know where he is?”
“No”, Shuri answered a little bit too fast, and a little smirk grows on his lips.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Are you sure he didn’t escape?”
“No. Pretty sure someone with a high-ranking pass, took him from the medical wing”.
There is silence.
“I’m pretty sure that whoever did it had good intentions”.
“The Elders may not see it like that”, he hears Shuri sigh annoyed and he can imagine her rolling her eyes. “They are not happy with how you rule, my Queen, I don’t think getting him out of the medical wing to keep him in your quarters is a wise decision”.
“He would have made a fuss if he didn’t see a familiar face”.
(It’s ironic when the one who made a fuss was her).
“He could have attacked someone. I wasn’t going to take that risk”.
Silence.
“The others are still in the tanks; he would have looked at them and calmed down”.
“Or would have destroyed the whole place thinking we did something to them. No, thank you, Okoye”.
“Very well, ma’am. I’ll see you in the morning, my Queen”.
Shuri doesn’t say anything while Okoye leaves the room and he doesn’t wait much to move.
Once her room door is closed, he steps out of the bathroom not caring if he gets caught or not.
“What did she mean?”, he asks in a rush, invading her personal space. She steps back in reflex, so he steps ahead again.
“I told you to not move”.
“Answer my question”.
Shuri sighs, going backward, while he keeps approaching.
She doesn’t answer until she stumbles with one of the walls of her room.
“Queen Shuri, your heartbeat is spiking, should I call Okoye back?”, a voice comes from the nothing, making him look around for the person.
“No, Griot, don’t call anyone”.
He looks at her, and he knows that he may look like the Namor that threatened her.
“Griot is my AI”, she explains, but he doesn’t get it, nor cares.
“What did she mean by the others in the tanks?”, he asks again.
Shuri sighs again, and for a few moments, she looks like a kitten and not a panther.
“You were conscious when I found you close to the water”, she starts explaining, without looking at him. “You were talking your language, rambling, and mumbling, Griot translated for me. After getting you medical help, I send the Dora Milaje, our best warriors, to infiltrate the colonizer’s ship and get your people out. They arrived a few hours ago”.
Something softens in his insides.
“Are they fine? How are they?”
“They are alright outside the fact that they are pretty drugged”.
“Drugged?” He is angry, and she knows it.
Her cholate eyes lock with his.
“The colonizers gave you and them something, we still don’t know what, but we are analyzing it to find a way to get it out of their system as fast as possible”.
“I want to see them”, she knows it's not a question. And he is pretty sure that she also knows that if she doesn’t let him go, he will find his way there.
“Okoye is going to kill me”.
“Aren’t you the Queen here?”
Shuri groans and a little smirk escape his lips.
“You’re very demanding, Fishboy”.
“Take that back”, he frowns, and she smirks, passing him.
“It's better than the boy without love”.
He wants to believe his chest made a fuss because he was angry and not because of a wave of warmth.
The medical wing was a lab with too much white for his taste and too much light. She was walking ahead of him, guiding him in the damn labyrinth that was the place like he had done with her in his nation.
He felt utterly uncomfortable with the damn clothes she gave him, they weren’t small or anything, he was just not used to use so many clothes or feeling cold. It was almost like it was hard to breathe.
Neither of them talked on their way to the medical wing. Some guards salute her and thanks to the clothing he was wearing, he wasn’t recognized.
“We are here”, she finally announced, and well, he didn’t expect to see all the white nor how she started moving and talking, or how nice she looked like she was in her element.
“Your people are over here, in some tanks”, he follows her to another room, and then, he finds them.
All of them, are there, floating in some tanks, with their eyes closed. He approached one of them and put his hand on the glass.
“If they gave us the same thing, why I’m awake?”
“I don’t know”, and he can sense that she feels like a failure for that. “I’m thinking that is because of your physiology. You can do things they can’t, like being in the land without a face mask, for example. We are working hard on finding a way to wake them up since the scans show that the drug is in their system in a high dose yet”, she then shows him some scans.
He stares at that and then at them and then looks at her again.
She was talking, explaining something to him, but he wasn’t listening, not really. She looked so beautiful when she explained things to him or when she talked in general.
And that’s when he notices that his mother’s bracelet is on her wrist.
It amuses him and…something else at the same time.
“You keep it”, he suddenly says, making her stop. She looks at him confused until he points at the bracelet.
She looks down at her wrist and…she flusters.
“Queen, your heartbeat is accelerating again”, he smirks, she looks mortified.
She shakes her head and mumbles something in her language before she looks at him.
“Yes, I keep it. Do you want it back?”
“No”, he answers before she can get it off. “I just thought you weren’t going to keep it after…our situation”.
“What situation?”
“Where we almost killed each other”.
A beat of silence.
“I’m glad you keep it”.
“And I’m glad you didn’t die in my arms. It would have made things much worse”, he chuckles, before approaching slowly, this time she didn’t step back.
“Thank you for rescuing them”.
“You made me promise that I was going to save them. At least, that’s what Griot translated before you lost consciousness”.
“Thank you for listening to me, then”.
“I have to listen to your little shows now and then, listening once more is not a problem”, she smiles at him before she passes by his side.
His arm moves alone and a second later, he has grabbed her hand.
“I had bad plans and wishes for you. For a fish that has been so long in the sea, that was pretty…immature”.
“Did you just make a sea pun?”
“That’s everything you catch from that, seriously?”, she laughs, and it takes him aback, is the first time he hears her doing that.
For a moment or two, he has never heard a more beautiful sound than that one. It made him forget what he was going to say.
She puts her hand in his, and he swears he can feel the warmth running through his bloodstream.
“That’s why I call you Fishboy, you may be older than me, but we both have much to learn”, and then she winks at him, and then she lets go.
He stays there, for a moment or two, processing the whole thing.
“If you want to stay with them, you can. I will tell Okoye to stop searching for you”.
He looks at her.
He simply nods and she does the same before she goes to the other room.
He sits down in one of the many chairs on the tables in front of the tanks. He hears Shuri talk with her AI while he looked at the tanks.
When morning comes, Shuri returns to check on him to find him sleeping on the table. She puts a blanket over his shoulders before she pats him in the head like a child.
“Rest, Fishboy, the Panther has it all under control”.